Superior Stories

"Superior Stories," winner of the 2025 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Chapbook Contest in fiction, is a series of six short stories which explore the lives of people who live in the northernmost part of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the Keweenaw.

Bryan Gruley (award-winning author of Bitterfrost, Starvation Lake, and other novels) notes, "In her linked story collection, 'Superior Stories, ' Helen Raica-Klotz takes readers deep into the physical and emotional lives of regular people trying and often failing to do the right thing--for themselves, their families, their friends, and their northern Michigan worlds. Raica-Klotz conjures evocative settings and richly layered up-north characters with language that is at once concrete and elegiac, painting a hard yet enchanting landscape of tarpaper roofs, black ice, and hoar frost-a travelogue of human hope and grief, aspiration and desperation."